Words, writing and the web

Changes to the editor in TypePad

SLOWLY TypePad are rolling out a new look editor within the service, and today it was the turn of many of the accounts I help people with.

And so I've had a few distressed calls as suddenly the old way of doing things has been wiped out by what looks like a new, snappy option, but which caused a bit of worry amongst my friends.

When I help people start a TypePad site I set it up so that the editor is in a Plain Text format, this means people can easily write articles elsewhere and copy and paste them across.

And most of the people I work with don't need to change font types, size or colour, they just want a simple text editing tool so they can spend time writing and not fiddling around with HTML and layouts.

So I'm sure you can see where I'm going here because this morning many people suddenly had all these options, were struggling to copy and paste articles across and spent some time tweaking things to get their work displaying properly.

But after a quick message to the help desk of TypePad there are a couple of changes you can make to get the editor back to something very close to the old style Plain Text version.

I've also gone to the Display Options box in the right hand column of the editor and made the choice to use the 'Light editor' this leaves me with a compose post window as seen in the image above.

Also if like me you use the Extended Posts option, that is you display a couple of paragraphs on the front page and then the full story after clicking through, you need to press the button that looks like a page with a blue line through it at the point you want the break.

And finally, I have noticed that all the old default categories have suddenly populated the drop down list of personalised ones I'd created, so you may want to go Configure >> Categories to delete those you are not using.

All very simple once you know how ;-) If you've any questions feel free to leave a comment below.

Craig, I think the isssue is, is blogging sexy anymore? The answer is clearly a NO. Blogging has entered the mainstream including the corporate world. More or less everyone is blogging, so it is no longer appealing.

Platforms such as Twitter are appealing, because:

1. You can express yourself immediately with immediate feedback
2. People have less time, therefore less time to blog

For a long time, I was the No. 1 blogger for my subject area, as I perhaps was the first one to blog about it. Then I took a break from blogging and find myself with many bloggers covering the same subject, which is no doubt good for the industry, but it has some what reduced my drive to continue blogging.

Craig- this is fantastic feedback, and really helpful. Would you consider letting us link to this (with full attribution, of course)? I think it dovetails nicely with some of the work we do on our knowledge base at http://support.typepad.com.